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A review by benplatt
My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems by Yi Lei
4.0
This is probably more of a 3.5 rather than a 4, but largely due to the questions surrounding this translation that arose in my mind during and after reading this collection. Lei's short collection of work here certainly stands out as distinct, especially, from what I understand, from the writing of earlier Chinese poets that preceded her - she writes directly and passionately about desire, the self, and the erotic body while entangling the self with the natural world in a way that can't help but draw comparisons to Walt Whitman, even if Lei herself hadn't explicitly put her poetry in conversation with Whitman herself. The imagery can be striking, but I couldn't help but be nagged by questions as I was reading it.
Tracy K. Smith, one of two collaborators who translated the work, is up front about her translation decisions in a preface to the collection - this is far from a literal translation, and rather attempts to (with Lei's approval) "build a similar spirit or feeling for readers of American English," resulting in deviations not only in vocabulary but even in the formal elements of the poems. With such a sparse set of poems from such a wide range of time, and with no other translations to compare to, I'm not sure how well that translation approach works. Sometimes the presence of Smith in the poem felt extremely clear, and I couldn't help but wonder where exactly the line was in the poetry I was reading between Smith, Lei, and Changtai Bi, the third collaborator in this translation who served as the intermediary translator between Lei and Smith. Translation is always tricky in this way, the translator is always present in the text, but I'm not always as aware of their presence or left with so many questions about the qualities of the translation. The messiness of the process of translation feels like it's on display here in a way that I'm not often consciously aware of. Without the context of other work translated into English from other translators, I don't have a way of answering these questions either, although I've certainly gained some insight from writers like Andrew Chan in his review at 4Columns (https://4columns.org/chan-andrew/my-name-will-grow-wide-like-a-tree)
Tracy K. Smith, one of two collaborators who translated the work, is up front about her translation decisions in a preface to the collection - this is far from a literal translation, and rather attempts to (with Lei's approval) "build a similar spirit or feeling for readers of American English," resulting in deviations not only in vocabulary but even in the formal elements of the poems. With such a sparse set of poems from such a wide range of time, and with no other translations to compare to, I'm not sure how well that translation approach works. Sometimes the presence of Smith in the poem felt extremely clear, and I couldn't help but wonder where exactly the line was in the poetry I was reading between Smith, Lei, and Changtai Bi, the third collaborator in this translation who served as the intermediary translator between Lei and Smith. Translation is always tricky in this way, the translator is always present in the text, but I'm not always as aware of their presence or left with so many questions about the qualities of the translation. The messiness of the process of translation feels like it's on display here in a way that I'm not often consciously aware of. Without the context of other work translated into English from other translators, I don't have a way of answering these questions either, although I've certainly gained some insight from writers like Andrew Chan in his review at 4Columns (https://4columns.org/chan-andrew/my-name-will-grow-wide-like-a-tree)